Free Owning Jacob - SA by Simon Beckett Page A

Murray. I'l be in touch.' He shook Ben's hand again. Up close his breath was heavy with coffee and cigarettes. His smile hid whatever he was thinking as Ben went out. 'And good luck with the book.'

    It was a purer, more simple vision through the camera.

    Sifted through the membrane of lens and filter, aperture and viewfinder, the world was changed, reality reduced to bite-sized, manageable slivers, immeasurably smal fragments of time plucked out by the click of a shutter. Ben found it comforting to be able to close out the world except for that one rectangle of light, framed by blackness. He could manipulate it, make it into what he wanted, before, during and even after the image had been captured.
    It was reassuring to think he was stil in control of something.
    When he first became interested in photography, in the second year of his fine art degree, it had been its apparent objectivity that had attracted him. He had seen a camera as a medium connecting the eye to the subject, but without the filter of an artist's perception to distort it. He had believed that through it he could show truer, more valid images than he could achieve with paintbrush and canvas. Even when he had begun accepting, and actively seeking, commissions for commercial work, he told himself that was completely different, financial y necessary but separate from what he was trying to achieve through his more personal efforts. Disil usionment came when he found himself employing the techniques learnt in one for the other, trying not to capture the moment but improve on it as he would the looks of any model. He had been rocked by his own infidelity and, looking at everything he had done up until that point, he had suddenly seen that it was every bit as subjective as any painting. What he'd thought was objectivity was only another form of manipulation. There was nothing intrinsical y truthful or real about it; his photographs didn't reveal, as he had believed, only distort in a more subtle way.
    Ben had come close to throwing out in disgust everything he had done. In the end, though, he hadn't. Nor did he have much time to dwel on his failure. Ironical y, as if to compensate, the commercial side of his work had begun to pick up almost immediately. He accepted the commissions and the money grateful y, cynical y rationalising that, if what he had been doing was worthless, then one type of photograph was as good as another.
    Sometimes, though, he would stil surprise himself.
    There was one photograph of Jacob that even now could make him think he had almost caught something. The boy's lack of self-consciousness made him an ideal subject.
    Provided Ben didn't use a flash and the shutter mechanism wasn't too noisy, Jacob would continue with whatever he was doing as though he weren't there. On this occasion, only a few weeks before he had been diagnosed as autistic, he had been watching television through his fingers, waving them to give a strobe effect. It was a favourite trick of his, but when Ben had tried it himself he found it hurt his eyes. Jacob didn't seem to tire of it, though.
    Ben had already taken most of a film, experimenting with different shutter speeds to vary the effect of the moving fingers.
    The nice thing about photographing Jacob was there was no rush. He adjusted the focus for a final close-up, and just as he pressed the shutter release Jacob suddenly looked straight at him. He had gone back to watching the television again a moment later, but for that instant it had been surprisingly disconcerting to have him unexpectedly staring back. Ben had lowered the camera feeling he'd somehow been found out.
    It wasn't until he'd developed the film that he was sure he'd caught the moment. In thirty-five of the thirty-six frames Jacob was looking away from the camera, but in the last one he was looking directly at it. His gold-flecked eyes gazed out in perfect focus from behind the blurred bars of his fingers, and Ben felt an echo of the same shock as